The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(108)

The wayhouse was a series of low buildings built of fired brick. The stable squatted across a thin, stone-paved road, a single light burning at its side where, Otah assumed, a guard slept. The wayhouse keeper stood outside, her hands on her hips and a dusting of flour streaking her robe. The captain of the guard stood before her, his arms crossed, while the keeper turned her head from side to side like a cat uncertain which window to flee through. When she saw Otah walking toward them, her face went pale and she took a pose of welcome and obeisance that bent her almost double.

"There's a problem?" Otah asked.

"There aren't rooms," the captain said. "All filled up, she says."

"Ah," Otah said, but before he could say more the captain turned on him. Even in the dim light, he could see a banked rage in the man's eyes. The captain took a pose that requested an audience more formal than the occasion called for. Otah replied with one, equally formal, that granted it.

"All respect, Most High, I have done my best all this campaign to respect your wishes. You want to dunk your head in river water, I haven't objected. You run off into the wilderness for half an evening with no guard or escort, and I've accepted that. But if you are about to suggest that we put the Emperor of the Khaiem in a sleeping tent in a wayhouse courtyard because someone else got here first, I'm resigning my commission."

"Actually, I was going to suggest that we offer the present guests our tents and compensation for their rooms," Otah said. "It seemed polite."

"Ah. Yes, Most High," the captain said. It was hard to tell in the night whether the man was blushing.

"There's room in the stables," the keeper said. She had an eastern accent.

"Yalakeht?" Otah asked, and the woman blinked.

"I grew up there," she said, a note of awe in her voice. As if recognizing an accent were a sign of supernatural power.

"It's a good city," Otah said. "Would there be room enough for your present guests if we put my guardsmen in the stables as well?"

"We'll find space, Most High," the keeper said.

"Then I'll go negotiate rooms for us," Otah said, and to the captain, "It might be more impressive if I went in with a guard. They'll be less likely to mistake me for a fraud."

"I ... yes, Most High," the captain said.

The air in the wayhouse was thickened by a chimney with a poor draw. Smoke haze gave the place a feeling of dread and poverty. The tables were dark wood, the floors packed earth. A dozen men and women sat in groups, a few in a smaller room to the side. All eyes were on the guard as they strode in and took formal stances. Otah stepped in.

The movement that stopped him was so slight it might almost not have existed and familiar enough to disorient him. A woman by the fire grate with her back to him shifted her shoulders. In anyone else, it would have been beneath notice. Otah stood, stunned, his heart thudding like it was trying to break free of his ribs. Idaan appeared at his side, her hand on his arm. He motioned her back.

"Eiah?" he said.

The woman by the fire turned to him. Her face was thin and drawn, older than time alone could explain. Her eyes were the same milky gray as Ana's.

"Father," she said.

The years had changed Otah Machi. The last time Maati had seen him, his hair had been black or near enough to pass. His shoulders had been broader, his eyebrows smooth. The man who stood before the smoking fire grate now was thinner, his skin loose against his face. His robes, though travel-stained, were of the finest cloth. They draped him like an altar; they made him more than a man. Or perhaps Otah Machi had always been something more than the usual and his robes only reminded them.

Danat, at his father's side, was unrecognizable. The ill, coughing boy confined to his bed had grown into a hale young man with intelligent eyes and his father's distant, considering demeanor. The others Maati had either seen recently enough that they held no disturbing sense of change or were strangers to him.

They had all come. Large Kae and Small Kae and Eiah, but to his discomfort also Idaan Machi, sitting on a bench with a bowl of wine in her hand and her face as expressionless as the dead. A Galtic girl sat apart, her head held high, sightless and proud to cover the disgust and horror she must feel at all Maati had done. Ashti Beg sat at her side, another victim of Vanjit's malice. After all that had happened, after all his many failures of judgment, seeing her among his arrayed enemies was still wrenching.

Otah's armsmen cleared the wayhouse. The conversation that should have taken place in the finest of meeting rooms in the high palaces instead found its place in a third-rate wayhouse, free of ceremony or ritual or even well-brewed tea. Maati felt himself trembling. He had the powerful physical memory of being a boy at the school, holding himself still and waiting for Tahi-kvo's lacquer rod to split his skin.

"Maati Vaupathai," the Emperor said.

"Most High," Maati replied, crossing his arms.

"I suppose I should start by asking why I shouldn't have you killed where you stand."

Eiah, beside him, twitched as if wasp-stung. Maati stared at his old friend, his old enemy, and all the conciliatory words that he had imagined in the last day vanished like a snuffed candle. There was rage in Otah's stance, and Maati found himself more than matching it.

"How dare you?" Maati said, his voice little more than a hiss. "How dare you? I thought, coming here, I would at least be treated with respect. I thought at the very least, that. And instead you stand me up like a common thief in a low-town courtroom and have me defend my life? Justify my right to breathe to the man who killed my son?"